Joelle points out that the movie "Dallas Buyers Club" -- winner of three Oscars on Sunday night, including best actor and best supporting actor -- started out as a narrative feature story in The Dallas Morning News.
The feature story can be found here. And the story of how Hollywood came calling is here.
This is not that unusual -- lots of great pieces of journalism end up on the silver screen.
Off the top of my head, the one that comes to mind is Argo -- it began as a feature in Wired magazine and became a film with Ben Affleck, and a winner of three Oscars too.
Also, Adaption was originally a New Yorker story "The Orchard Thief" -- and that bit is worked into the movie version.
And here's one I bet you didn't know --- "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," that classic movie with Sean Penn -- was actually based on a 1981 Playboy magazine article by Cameron Crowe (yeah, that guy, the one whose turn as a Rolling Stone reporter was the basis of the movie "Almost Famous" ) when he went undercover back at this old high school.
Many other features stories are optioned by Hollywood and, like what almost happened to "Dallas Buyers Club," which took 20 years to get made, are stuck in development hell forever.
But still, it's nice to have had the shot.
There's also this: http://bit.ly/NszugK about the "12 Years a Slave" movie originating from a 161-year-old New York Times article.
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